The Life of a Rookie NFL Cheerleader

They're paid the same as a braces-clad babysitter, and yet often have a decade of highest-level dance and performance experience under their low-slung, sequined belts. But despite national protest over their skimpy wages, super-pumped women are still signing up in droves to be NFL cheerleaders. Jen Ortiz embedded with 14 high-kicking, OMG-ing Philadelphia Eagles rookies—the team's largest class in years—to find out why they're told to act like Miley.

Way before that first kick-off of the NFL season, the Rookie Story emerges. _Is he gonna start? Will he get cut? Is #Manzieling a thing?! _But what about the other set of rookies standing in the tunnel, waiting for their cue to run out onto the field? The other professional athletes who also happen to be physician assistants, speech pathologists, and pre-med majors?

The NFL cheerleader is the real-life ultimate dream girl. The Kelly Kapowskis and Ali Larter-in-Varsity-Blue-s of the world. The Sunday afternoon eye candy that, lately, isn’t taking any of the league’s alleged precedent of crazily low (sometimes illegal!) standard wages bullshit anymore. After a visit to the City of Brotherly Love and questionable sports fans; after overhearing a kid eagerly albeit skeptically ask, "Are they real cheerleaders?"; and after seeing grown, adult men revert to their dirt-toeing 12-year-old selves when they walk by, I met her—or, fourteen of her. For two days, I embedded with the largest rookie class the NFL Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders have recruited in years. Pompoms ahead.

10-ish a.m. On a muggy mid-summer Monday in Philadelphia at Lincoln Financial Field, the Eagles home stadium, it feels like the first day of school. Inside the staff entrance known as "Stadium Control," Barbara Zaun, director of the Philadelphia Eagles Cheerleaders, walks through the ground level staff-only area waving, stopping for a hug, exchanging _good to see you!_s.

Today will be a sort of dress rehearsal for that first September game day—it’s an open training camp day for the players—and inside, the cheerleaders’ locker room seems huge. A walk from front to back takes you past a bank of lockers painted signature midnight green and a brightly lit, mirror-lined bay for primping. Matching black mesh tote bags—each with a silver ruffled skirt, that says CHEERLEADER in block capital letters on one side, a bedazzled eagle head on the other—are scattered atop the room’s countertops. In about an hour or so, when the entire cheerleading team, give or take a set of poms or two, it will seem much smaller. And tanner.

11:07 a.m. Upstairs, in a mid-level stadium concourse, a few cheerleaders are mingling with fans. (It’s Military Appreciation Day, and all sorts of uniformed servicemen and women are here to be appreciated.) On one side a three-woman USO singing troupe belt out almost-comically patriotic tunes (think: Lee Greenwood’s "Proud to Be an American") in army-themed pin-up-y getups. Six-foot-tall Swoop, the team mascot, posts up for photo-ops.

Nearby, 30-year-old Army sergeant Mark Flammer is here with his younger brother and stepdad. He’s still grinning moments after snapping a photo with a few cheerleaders. They plan to send the photo to a friend who couldn’t make it today, you know, to make him jealous. But that can’t be reason enough for the smile that’s still plastered on his face.

"It’s kind of like awe," Flammer says, of meeting the ladies.

"And they seem to have a nice personality too," says his brother.

It’s an exciting morning for the team’s rookies, too. Jess, a physics and pre-med student at West Chester University who looks like a taller, slightly less baby-faced Selena Gomez, explains nearly punctuationlessly the day so far:

"Today? It’s kind of been my favorite, really. All, our favorite. Our first like really big appearance, so it’s really exciting, I mean, everything that’s been going on is just completely exciting and we’re all just like, everything that goes on, the rookies we’re like, Oh my God, like pumped up to do this thing. People ask us sometimes what we’re looking forward to the most in the season, and it’s just like, we look forward to the next big thing in the season and then after that we’re like, Okay the next big thing! And it’s like there’s not really one thing we’re looking forward to, it’s just the entire season is just full of so many things that we’re so happy to be in and it’s still very surreal for us, so most of us still wake up and go, Oh my God, we’re an Eagles cheerleader, it’s very exciting and just unbelievable. Really unbelievable."

11:24 a.m. Back in the locker room, there’s skin everywhere. The space is now filled with 38 girls in the team’s Vera Wang-designed uniform—the summer uniform, to be exact: bright white bra-like tops with midnight green and black accents, with matching itsy bitsy shorts, nude tights, black sequined sneakers, and sparkly earrings. The "a little revealing, but comfortable" uniform is about as close to naked as it can get on family-friendly Sunday television. Once empty countertops are now littered with cooling flat irons, overflowing makeup bags, and half-eaten plates of fruit.

The rustling sounds of 38 pairs of pompoms blend in with locker room chatter like, "Your makeup looks really good, by the way." It’s dizzying. Everywhere you turn the prettiest girl you’ve ever seen is saying hi. Most sentences you overhear end in happy exclamation marks. And the smiling, so much smiling. Your cheeks ache just looking at it.

12:01 p.m. The Philadelphia Eagles Cheerleaders make their way onto the field. It’s a pre-season Monday afternoon so the stadium is only a quarter full. But it’s enough. Pompoms wave. In the stands, fans are screaming: "HI, LADIES!"

The Eagles pep band steps out and the first familiar notes of the fight song, traditionally played after every touchdown, begin to play.

_Fly, Eagles fly, on the road to victory, _(running in place with pompoms high in the air like they’re crossing the finish line in first place!)

It starts to drizzle as some stone-faced flag bearers take the field. Teetering with perfect pageant posture, the women bend their right leg and hold their left pompoms against their hips. They mannequin-freeze, mid-march, until the national anthem is over.

Someone in the stands screams: "AMERICA!"

12:18 p.m. The Eagles players are running around the field, presumably doing something worth watching, as the girls make their way back into the locker room.

In what feels like the blink of a silvery pom, Snow has transformed into the coolest girl at your office—stylish black and white patterned pants, a green top with an abstract black print, and a pair of low black heels. Her long auburn hair, styled in loose waves, has been swept up and tucked into a low bun. But the uniform’s sparkly earrings—or as she describes them "the final cherry on the sundae"—are still there.

Next, she’ll put on is the white doctor’s jacket currently hanging in the front passenger seat of her light blue Scion in the stadium parking lot. As the training badge on the arm of her jacket indicates, Snow is a student at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine where she’s pursuing a master’s in physician-assistant studies.

Snow moved to Philadelphia a little over two years ago following a year off after graduating from the University of California, San Diego in part to work as an EMT. It’s here that she fell for football—"Moving to Philly, you get swept up in it—everyone’s talking about it at work and you start following it and you’re like,_ Wow, this is a big deal here_"—and so, as a former pageant girl, figure skater, and Philadelphia Flyers ice dancer, she decided to attend the Eagles cheerleaders’ open call a few months ago.

1:36 p.m. After 50 minutes of driving, Snow arrives at the Nouveau Cosmetic center in Newark, Delaware. The switch from pompoms to white-jacket-mode can be a difficult one sometimes, especially when there isn’t much time in between, but she manages. "It’s sort of something that you get used to after jugging different things for a long time," she says. "And I kinda like that constant amped up feeling. Being always on your toes."

She doesn’t usually tell patients she’s an Eagles cheerleader—but her coworkers do. Like the patient she meets about ten minutes after stepping inside the office, an elderly woman who suffered a fall two weeks ago and broke some skin on her leg. The wound isn’t healing so Snow’s boss, calls for a "wound debridement," a process in which the layer of the possibly inflected, now-blackened skin is scraped(!) off the wound. It’s a hell of a lot more harrowing to watch than, say, the locker-room eye shadow routine.

The patient asks her which, the physician assistant one or the cheerleader one, is her primary job. Snow doesn’t know how to answer. One of the biggest misconceptions that non-cheerleaders have about cheerleaders is that it’s a full-time job. A full-time commitment, yes—one that requires six hours of rehearsals a week in addition to any appearances, takes over the next however many Sundays are in a season, and demands lots and lots of smiling. A career, not quite. It’s more of a hobby, another rookie explains later.

But whether they mean it, or have been media-trained, or maybe a little of both, all of the rookies I speak with echo Snow’s take on it all: the pay the Eagles cheerleaders receive is commensurate with the effort and hours they put forth, not that it really matters, because it’s just like that final cherry on the sundae. "The work that we do, our pay goes along very well," she says. "I mean, there’s so many amazing opportunities with this job—and it’s a job, but it’s fun. It’s kind of priceless. So thinking about pay—that’s an added bonus, really."

Fifteen or so minutes later, Snow readies a long, terrifying-looking needle filled with some numbing I’m-not-sure-what. The patient bravely grits her teeth every time the needle goes in beneath the surface skin. Snow helps wipe away any blood that drips down the patient’s shin. The sight of the bright red ooze doesn’t move her. In fact, it sort of fills her with the same kind of feeling she felt on the field today: "Adrenaline is adrenaline—it’s the same thing that’s running through my veins."

6:15 p.m. Normally, Diane might just be getting home from a long workday—she gets to her desk around 7:30 a.m.—at Lockheed Martin where the West Chester University graduate works in supply-chain management. But she took the day off today for the open training camp, for that first moment on the field, so right now she’s sipping an iced coffee at Elixr in Philadelphia’s Center City neighborhood. She looks casual, a kind of effortless pretty—the cheerleader makeup has been washed off. Her long, straight dark brown hair falls past her shoulders. She’s traded in her two-piece uniform for a summery full-length one-piece patterned jumpsuit. "I like your dress," the guy behind the counter erroneously flirt-blurts out to her. She offers back just a polite thanks—she has a boyfriend, even though he’s a Giants fan.

Making the team "still hasn’t hit me yet." As a Pennsylvania-native and, more importantly, a "born and raised" Eagles fan—her mom cried when she made the team—Diane always wanted to try out for the squad. (She cheered in college, too.) "So tryouts came around this year and I was like, Why not? And I make it and it’s just crazy," she says. Especially the part where everyone wants your photo. "It’s like we’re hometown celebrities," she says. But once the uniform is off, it’s back to normal, a much less show-y kind of normal: "I’ll have someone sitting next to me and they’re the biggest Eagles fan and they’re talking about it and I’m sitting here like, I’m a cheerleader. But I’m not going to be like, ’Hey! I’m a cheerleader!’"

It makes sense then that Diane hasn’t told many people at work. She was promoted to a new group right before auditions, she explains, and feels like she may need to prove herself to her new coworkers first. "I think that someone would have their opinions because I am a younger employee," she says, "So, yeah, maybe they wouldn’t take me as serious."

10:04 a.m., the next day It’s a few minutes past call time. Compared to yesterday’s skin-clad costume, this morning’s look is rather conservative: midriff-baring white short-sleeve polo shirts with an eagle head on the back that zip up (and down) for customizable cleavage coverage; tiny skorts that cover everything they need to though not much more; nude-colored tights; and those sparkly black sneakers. Kayla, an elementary education major at La Salle University, and Pilar, a rookie studying speech pathology at La Salle University, are sitting quietly in the reception area, staring at their phones. The two, along with a member of the Eagles marketing team, are waiting for Jess to arrive before driving over to today’s appearance.

10:41 a.m. The cheerleader-packed car pulls up to what looks like a bounce house warehouse sale—an inflatable obstacle course, an inflatable water slide, and an inflatable pirate ship cover an otherwise idyllic-looking green space in front of The Dell Music Center. There are 1,200 elementary school-aged kids—here today for the aptly titled KID FEST from summer camps around the area—happily screaming at the top of their lungs.

Jess, Kayla, and Pilar take their post behind a table in front of the Eagles Book Mobile where, for the next 90 minutes or so, they’ll help kids pick out books to take home. The massive RV they’re posted in has been made over in the team’s midnight green shade with smiling images of quarterback Nick Foles and linebacker DeMeco Ryans holding books (Oh, The Places You’ll Go! and Monster Mash, respectively).

If the cheerleaders are flustered by the never-ending swarm of kids, you wouldn’t know it by their bouncy _hi!_s and the way they enthusiastically search for "the joke book" that every other kid requests. Kayla, especially, would be forgiven for at least letting a yawn slip even though she doesn’t—she woke up at her home in New York at 5 a.m. to catch the 7:05 a.m. train into Philadelphia for this.

11:21 a.m. A boy sidles up to the table. His pupils appear to have been replaced with tiny cartoon hearts. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the, say, 11- or 12-year-old, wearing ripped denim shorts and a bright green FUBU t-shirt, at the table. In fact, it’s his third visit so far this morning, which says something considering that he is surrounded by a kid’s bouncy paradise. He finally decides on a copy of _Diary of a Wimpy Kid _and runs off.

11:24 a.m. He’s back again. He leaves again.

11:25 a.m. This time he arrives with his friend in tow. The two boys chase and play-fight each other as the friend nudges him towards the table and nods in Pilar’s direction. Turns out, the frequent visitor has something to say. What does he want to tell her? "That she’s cute." He runs away again.

11:27 a.m. "There’s a lot of people—nevermind." Off he goes.

12:31 p.m. Renee, another rookie, couldn’t make this morning’s appearance. As a speech pathologist, she works with K-12 students in a rotating list of schools, and part-time year-round at local hospitals, which is where she began her morning at 7 a.m. Right now she’s across town at a Santucci’s, one of several in the restaurant chain founded by her grandfather, grabbing a quick lunch. It was at a Santucci’s that, as a kid, she knew she wanted to be a cheerleader: "We do these trading cards with a quick getting-to-know-you on the side and you write down your favorite restaurant. One year, an Eagles cheerleader wrote Santucci’s so my dad hung it in some of the restaurants. I remember looking at it when I was little and thinking: Oh, I want to be one of those when I get older."

6:45 p.m. Rehearsal starts in fifteen. Most of the cheerleaders are already here, and like every Tuesday and Wednesday, they’ll practice inside this inexplicably warm tented replica of the football field inside Lincoln Financial Field. There are white and midnight green-trimmed black sports bras and matching sporty short shorts everywhere—sitting on the Astroturf talking weekend plans, practicing some dance moves in the corner, rushing inside from the parking lot.

Choreographer Lance Love—of course that’s his name, even though he’s actually the assistant choreographer, filling in for his boss while she’s on vacation—arrives as Barbara goes over her list of upcoming appearance opportunities. Training camp, a youth cheerleading camp, filling backpacks with school supplies for some cutesy-named organization that instantly inspires _aww_s and _I want to do that!_s. Volunteering hands race into the air, dates are jotted down into planners and punched into iPhone calendars.

7:14 p.m. The bass from a pulsating Jock Jams-y beat starts blaring from the surrounding speakers perched above head level. Lance—a handsome twentysomething dressed the part in snug black Adias track-pants, black and red high-tops, and a Keith Haring-ish tribal print T-shirt—leads the team, now neatly assembled in three rows along the field’s sideline in a warm-up. Neck rolls, forward bends, deep lunges. Lance is charmingly spry throughout the next few hours. The kind of guy who says things like, "Take that leap!" and then leaps in the air.

The football field turns into a ballet class. Feet point and flex while kicking. Front side back side. Their faces are unsmiling as they concentrate. Knees raise, feet point, they maintain their balance like frozen fleshy flamingos. A Pitbull song comes up. The already-warm tented space feels approximately 15 degrees warmer.

7:48 p.m. It’s finally time to dance, almost. First, the team repeats a series of dance steps from one of the team’s quarter breaks (quick dance routines to pump-up songs like Jason Derulo’s "Talk Dirty" and something called "We Came to Smash"). The only sounds in the room come from the rustling pompoms and Lance who repeats, "1-2-and-3-and-4-5-6-7-8!"

"Use Disney Channel faces!" he tells them. The face should be warm and friendly, Lance explains, but the body should be seductive, sexy, "like oh my God." Think Miley Cyrus, he says, "But ’Party in the U.S.A.,’ not ’Wrecking Ball.’"

8:12 p.m. An edited cut of that Ariana Grande ft. Iggy Azalea song "Problem" comes blaring from the sound system. They run through the accompanying quarter break dance routine over and over and over again. In unison: thirty-plus sets of pompoms wave in the air, bodies twirl, hips pop, legs bend, and other parts do other maneuvers that imply flirty, high-energy dancing. The faces read Disney, the bodies say sexy, and Ariana Grande’s voice loudly stresses that she’d be better off without some guy.

Somehow it never stops being fun to watch.

Thirty-five minutes later, the team does the very first run-through of its pregame dance. The set of moves that will get the Philadelphia crowd on their feet before the players even touch the ball. The dance that’s a series of twirls, popping hips, and fluttering pompoms set to the tune of OneRepublic’s "Love Runs Out,"

I’ll be your light, your match, your burning sun...

Outside the sun’s gone down. For most, the workday is over. But for the team, it won’t end until 10 p.m. tonight.

Out of the hundreds of women who auditioned, and then, out of the 60 finalists, the 14 women who make up the Eagles’ rookie class have made it through two workshops, several auditions and job interviews, and a two-hour long beauty pageant-esque final audition show at the Perelman Theater at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center. They’ll rehearse six hours a week for the next five months. And on average, the team of 39 women will complete 350 appearances in a year—that’s three appearances per month per cheerleader. And, of course, there’s the eight weeks of home games throughout the season, each requiring hours and hours of dancing on loop. Through it, they’ll bend, they’ll hair-flip, and they’ll Miley-smile it up. They’re not in it for the money, and the hours are pretty rough. They do it to leave you in, kind of like, awe.

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